After more than a year in preparation, Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, a new encyclopedia edited by Robin Reid and forthcoming from Greenwood, has finally gone to press. This is a mammoth two-volume work of some 320,000 words and 1,500 manuscript pages (700 pages in the final published form). The first volume consists of lengthier, more general essays, by period, medium, subgenre, and so forth (more details here); while the second volume consists of many more, and shorter, entries on specific authors and works (some additional informaiton here).
I wrote two small entries for Volume II, on Lloyd Alexander and Karen Wynn Fonstad. Both topics were, in fact, not on Robin’s original list, but she added them at my suggestion, so I feel good about making sure they weren’t overlooked. Both passed away recently (Alexander, very recently), so I felt the entries afforded me an opportunity for a last eulogy to them. In fact, Alexander was still alive when I submitted my entry on him, and I had intended to write to him again (as I had back in the middle 1980’s) to tell him about it. The news of his death put an end to those plans and necessitated some alteration of the entry on him — mainly in the matter of tense.
Anyway, this new encyclopedia (planned for release this coming June, at a whopping $249.05) promises to be a valuable new resource for the study of its subject(s). Those of you with an interest may want to alert your local library systems to the publication. If it helps, its ISBN is 978-0-313-33589-1, though I don’t see it on Amazon quite yet.
PS. For those curious who wrote the entry on J.R.R. Tolkien (which I desperately wanted), it was Amy Sturgis. So at least if I couldn’t get the assignment, it was nevertheless in good hands. (I also wanted Ursula K. Le Guin, but didn’t get that assignment either. :)
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320,000 words and $249.00?
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia is 58% longer but $50.00 cheaper.
Congratulations on another publication!
Yes, Greenwood (as well as its imprint Praeger) is notoriously expensive. The recent four-volume set C.S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (Praeger) is $300.00 for 1416 pages. Tolkien’s Legendarium is $105 for only 296 pages. Similarly, J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances is also $105, but for only 224 pages. J.R.R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism is a slightly better value at $95 for 275 pages. But these are hardly affordable for a starving scholar.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the congratulations! It’s a very, very small contribution to a very large publication; however, to Greenwood’s immense credit, every contributor, no matter how few words he or she contributed, gets a complimentary copy of the two-volume set. I hope somebody from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) is reading this ...
Jason
ReplyDeleteThanks for this - a must get - between this, The Journal of Tolkien Studies and the Tolkien Encyclopedia I won't have any savings left! Ah, well you can't take it with you!!
Congrats on great reviews for The STYO and I look forward to reading Kane's assessment.
Cheers, Andy
Thanks for this - a must get - between this, The Journal of Tolkien Studies and the Tolkien Encyclopedia I won't have any savings left!
ReplyDeleteSo true. If I didn’t get a free copy, there’s little chance I could afford it. At least not without really raiding the piggy bank. But it’s an encyclopedia whose time has definitely come.